Despite the economic recession, which required downward adjustments to RFID market forecasts for 2009 and 2010, the RFID market is expected to experience steady growth through the next five years. The overall RFID market is expected to exceed $8.25 billion by 2014. That would represent a 14% compound annual growth rate over the next five years. In 2010 alone, the RFID market appears set to reach a size of $4.47 billion, 15% more than the adjusted 2009 figure. Going to 2014, the greatest growth will be found in RTLS (Real Time Location Systems), baggage handling, animal ID, and item-level tagging in fashion apparel and retail. (Source: ABI Research, Semi-Annual RFID Market Data, March 2010).
“Modernizing” applications for RFID will grow more rapidly than their “traditional” predecessors such as access control, automobile immobilization, electronic toll collection, and others that account for slightly more than 61% of the total market today. These “traditional” applications are expected to grow 6% compounded annually from 2010 through 2014. In contrast, “modernizing” applications—animal ID, asset management, baggage handling, cargo tracking and security, POS-contactless payment, RTLS, supply chain management, and ticketing—are forecast to grow roughly 19% in the same time period. (Source: ABI Research, Semi-Annual RFID Market Data, March 2010).
There has been much research and development into RFID tagging and tracking technologies. However, all such research has examined tagging and tracking single tags in isolation. The large projected growth in “modernizing” applications brings a new need in the market for an ability to identify, locate, and track sets of tags in real-time.
Therefore, it was recognized by the present inventors that a breakthrough in the state of the art would allow RFID systems to identify sets of tags in real-time, and to use the identified sets to locate and track the movement of the objects to which the RFID tags are attached. It is against this background that various embodiments of the present invention were developed.